I published the first half of this essay last week.  I meant to publish Part B the next day, but I got lost in work and life.  Soooo here it is now.   But it won’t make any sense without Part A.  If you haven’t read Part A, click here to read it first.

Cross-Text Contradictions

Cross-Text Contradictions are more difficult for me to sort out.

The concept of “intentional discrepancy” I used in Inner-Textual Contradictions  is excluded here.  To say two authors of separate books colluded together to create intentional contradictions across books means those authors:

Believed their books would continued to be studied centuries after their deaths,
Planned for their individual works to someday be placed next to one another in a larger work we now call “The Bible.”
Had some sort of meeting at which they agreed to purposely contradict one another in order to hide some concept lost to their individual works, which could only be discovered when their two books were put next to one another and compared.

None of this I believe to be true about the authors of the Bible.

(One might argue the intervention of the Holy Spirit here.  This is a topic I could take up at another time, but will leave undiscussed in this essay because I promised in my introduction not to cry “Because Jesus said so!” as part of any argument in this series.)

I see Cross-Text Contradictions happening in two primary locations within Biblical narrative.   I find them when I compare 1st and 2nd Chronicles with 1st and 2nd Samuel/1st and 2nd Kings; and then when I compare the four Gospel accounts: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  This makes sense as both of these examples are comprised of different authors explaining the same historical event.  The Gospels were all written to explain the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  The Chronicles and Kings both explain the political rise and fall of the People of God.   Even though there are these multiple book describing the same periods of history, I find these contradictions to be surprisingly rare.

The first Cross-Text Contradiction I struggled with I stumbled across when I was a kid.  Around the age of eleven or twelve I began reading the Bible every night before I went bed.  It helped calm my mind down.   I remember one night finishing Matthew and then skipping to Acts.  There I discovered the two different descriptions of Judas’ death.  Judas was the follower of Jesus who helped the Romans arrest Jesus in exchange for a bag of silver.  Matthew says that after the arrest that Judas gave back the silver and then hung himself (Matthew 27:5).  Luke, the author of Acts, says Judas used the money to buy a field and then fell off a cliff and his intestines spilled all over the place (Acts 1:18).  I remember asking my mom in the morning about the contradiction.  She sweetly replied, “Judas hung himself over a cliff.  The rope snapped.  He fell.  And his intestines went everywhere.”   This explanation was satisfying until more Cross-Text Contradictions reared their heads, like who was at the cross when Jesus died (which is only a contradiction if you think the Beloved was John), who was at the tomb, or how old was Jehoiachin when he became king?

As I find these frustrating moments, the mistrustful cynic in me says, “Clearly this is all made up.  If I’m suppose to trust this text, then it needs to get it’s facts straight.  How can I believe Jesus died on the cross if you can’t get your story together about how Judas died?”

Surprisingly I find this “Brick Wall” approach, as Rob Bell described it in his book Velvet Elvis, coming mostly from Christian thinkers.  The idea is that the Biblical narrative is a brick wall.  If one brick is missing than the whole wall falls down; therefore every thought in the Bible must be completely accurate or it is all false.  I’ve never seen a non-Christian thinker claiming this.  I’ve never read, “Because two books clearly written by opposing political parties confuse the age at which Jehoiachin became king, then Jesus didn’t die on the cross.”   The entire idea feels absurd.  Imagine if we held modern news organizations up to the same standard.  All journalists would be thought of as liars.  They wouldn’t be able to speak about things as simple as traffic, much less report on things happening at City Hall.

I do realize the contradictions within the Gospels are a different story.  They were not opposing political parties, but rather contemporaries reacting to a world changing movement of which they were a part.  My seminary professors went to great lengths to try and teach me how the pre-Enlightenment mind didn’t care about the fine details of a report like us moderns do, or how the Gospel authors were not journalists but rather conveying a true story with meaning, and or how their contradictions around small details bolsters their position as eye-witnesses (because eye-witnesses never agree where as conspirators always do).  But these things did not help me.

Rather, what help me was trust.  When I see these contradictions with a trusting eye I ask instinctively ask, “Does it matter?”  Yes, it would be nice if Luke and Matthew had gotten together over a cup of coffee and got on the same page about how Judas died; but clearly that didn’t happen.  So now what? Should I reject the entire house because I found a cracked brick?  Maybe if that brick were to lead to a bigger discovery – like the foundation being cracked; but I have yet to find a Cross-Text Contradiction that is more than a chipped brick.   Everyone of these contradictions I’ve found has been small and inconsequential to the world-view the narrative is explaining.

Character Contradictions

And here is the rub.  Many authors I’ve read and friends who struggle with the text believe they have discovered a “cracked foundation.”  Most often this is a contrast between what they think of as “defining actions of God in the Old Testament” and the description of “Jesus as love.”

To say it simply, I don’t believe these contradictions exist.  I don’t see contradictions in God’s character in the narrative.

Don’t misunderstand.  I get the contrasts and why they cause confusion.  (I’m going to devote two essays in the future – numbers four and five – to my understanding of the contrast between a loving God and Biblical violence.)  But I don’t see the contrasts as a contradictions.

In the narrative of the Bible, the character of God is not a static figure.  He is a dynamic character with great depth and range.

We (and by “we” I mean Christians) take great comfort in defining God as a set of static principles.  We like to remove Him as a character and think of him rather as an unemotional, non-responsive, stoic narrator.  He is easier for us to deal with this way.  To force God into this box we sum him up with statements like “God is love” or “God is for his glory” or “God is all powerful.”  These statements are the Pepto Bismal of philosophical thought.   They to sooth our digestion of a complex God, removing heartburn his richness creates.  When we do this we make God into a servant of laws.  He becomes a slave to some hidden rules, greater and more powerful than he is.

The raw Biblical narrative is not so kind to our mind and soul.  It assumes a living God who is only consistent because he has promised to be so.  In the Biblical narrative there is no “Supreme Court” beyond God who could call him out or veto his actions.  There is no Supernatural Constitution he must abide by.

There is only him.  In the Biblical narrative God answers only to himself.

And this God is not tame.  He is not a predictable machine humming away at his work.  As the author of the first Proverb begins, “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”  (Proverbs 1:7)  In the Biblical narrative God is a robust character with depth and complexity.  He is the hero of the story – the greatest and richest hero ever described with words.

The Biblical narrative is also not a predictable equation of steps.  The story is not math.   It is a dialog, a give and take.  And like any great epic, at times it is messy.  It’s emotional.  It’s full of twists and turns and unexpected moments.

Do not think of the Biblical narrative as a history book.  Rather approach it as you would a dramatic love story.  It is the tale of a husband and his unfaithful wife.  Thus it is not a predictable prescription of steps moving toward and end goal.  It is a roller-coaster of celebration, pain, failure, and restoration.

This is why I do not see contradictions in the character of God within the narrative.  He is not static.  He is alive and moving.

Restating the Question

So to ask it again, “How do I see contradictions within the Bible?”

When they occur within the same text, I choose to see them as intentional.  I’ve been reading the Bible through (cover to cover) since I was twelve and I’ve yet to find a cross text contradiction that bothers me.  Others have told me the character of God in the narrative has contradictions, but I think that is a misunderstanding of God’s character.

A Final Word on Trust

As I said at the beginning, my approach to contradictions changes according to my level of trust.  I believe we are all this way.

Doctor Spock, the purely logical Vulcan who makes decisions according to reason alone, is fiction.  Our reason is never completely free from our emotional response to the subject.  We cannot help but be shaped by our trust or mistrust.  No matter how hard we deny it or push against it, there is no separating the mind and the heart.  Their connected nature is part of the human condition.

What is it then that builds or deteriorates our trust?

I will not venture to speak for all of humanity here, but for me. my trust in the Bible is directly linked to my encounters with people who claim to live by the text.  Put plainly, when I see church people behaving like crap, my trust in the Biblical narrative erodes.  When church people are loving and striving to live up to the message they proclaim, my trust in the narrative is strengthened.

I believe this trust is communicated across generations.  We inherit the perspective of our parents.  A friend from London once explain it to me this way:  ”When my grandparents were in school,” he said, “almost everyone in their class, three out of four kids, participated regularly in a church.  When my parents were in school that dropped to around half.  Two out of four kids in their class participated in church stuff.  When I was in school it was down to one in three.  Now my kids are in school and it is one in six or one in eight.”  As less people have positive interactions of the community based on the Bible – local churches – less people will trust the Biblical narrative and use it as a guide for their world view.

This isn’t meant to be a statement of “right or wrong.”  Nor is this intended to in any way diminish those who do not share my trust in the narrative.  In fact the entire argument I’ve just made could be flipped on me.  One might as easily argue, “Jeff, the only reason you embrace the world view of the Biblical Narrative is because were raised by people who trust it.”  This commentary on trust therefore is simply an observation of how we as emotional/rational creatures come to adopt one world view over another.

I do believe there is a warning in here for all of us though – regardless of the world-view you are propagating.  If you want people to be more likely to share your view of the world, don’t spend your time creating complex arguments; rather, invest your energy into living your world view with integrity and thus proving it to be worthy of people’s consideration.

…said the man who just wrote a 4000 word essay on Biblical contradictions.  The irony is not lost on me.

For the next essay I’ll struggle with the statement, “Christians only live by some of the Bible.  They pick and choose what they want to follow and what they don’t.”